


The Sentience Paradox

by anstoirm



Series: Fireteam Ward [1]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-14 15:23:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15391722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anstoirm/pseuds/anstoirm
Summary: AKA: do exos dream of electric sheep?Quinn has a question for Gil-23. He's not sure how to answer.





	The Sentience Paradox

“Gil.”

The exo is well aware that Quinn has been trying to get his attention for the last few minutes.

“Gil.”

The exo is also well aware that he’s been ignoring all attempts.

He knows that she gets bored being the only one in the team Shaxx refuses to allow participation in the Crucible, but he does not plan to reward her for the team-disrupting behavior—her flawless team participation outside of the Crucible notwithstanding.

He ducks under a burst of fire from the opposing three-man team, turns his back against the rock outcropping as Luke and Kel pop around either side with their guns firing to push the other team back.  


Gil’s helmet HUD flashes as his shields recharge, and a distant flicker of reflected light on a rock cliff just on the boundary of the arena catches his eyes; mechanical eyes more attuned to fine detail than organic ones pick out the stock and barrel of Quinn’s favored sniper rifle.

“Gil?”

He grunts, his ghost intuitively swapping his comms back to the team channel and away from the private one she keeps attempting to open.

_‘Yeah, baby, rock n’ roll!’_

_‘Sniper left.’_

_‘Got him! Eat it—oh shit—’_

Aggravation rolling through synthetic synapses, Gil makes a future note to coach Luke on keeping the irrelevant comm chatter to a minimum. A part of him, the part that more closely mimics the organic mind, knows this will do absolutely nothing to hamper the warlock’s excitable nature.

Almost as if to bookend the thought, loud, jarring beats—some pre-Golden Age style music called ‘metal’—starts blaring over the team comms. Registering from Luke’s signature. He grumbles. _Humans_.

“Gil.”

His facial plates shift into a pinched look. Irritation. Practiced, weary patience. Gil is _old_ even by guardian standards, and even with the extended lifespan Quinn has as the anomaly she is, she is still very young and thus lacks said patience. He takes a moment to think and figures he can ask Shaxx to allow her to participate in the crucible once they’ve finished this match. Again.

Or, at the very least, delegate the task to Luke.

Another moment of thinking. It’s a fitting punishment for Luke’s abuse of the team comms.

“Gil, can I please ask you something?” She tries, again, and this time there’s something in the way she says it that causes his subroutines to cycle to a halt and reconsider ignoring her—something hesitant, almost meek, and very, _very_ unlike the Quinn he’s come to know.

His eyes shift back to the distant gleam of Martian sunlight off her rifle, his jaw light flashing as he clenches it, and he considers. He doesn’t have enough information. He shifts, poking his head up over his cover and noting that his teammates are performing quite admirably on their own.

He switches back to team comms.

“Luke, Kel—bowing out for a minute.”

_‘Got it.’_

_‘Where you goin’, boss man? Is t—THAT’S A ROCKET LAUN—’_

The sound of Luke’s connection to the channel vanishing in a haze of static and explosives that echoed outside of comms results in nothing but a slow, long-suffering blink and sigh from the exo. He works his jaw again, then stands up and darts out of the line of fire heading in the distant cliff’s direction.

Quinn is perched on the edge once he makes his way up to her, gaze down her rifle’s scope on the match below and her hands steady but nowhere near the trigger. Shaxx was not a terribly patient titan, and it had taken a lot of her begging for him to even allow her to accompany her fireteam into matches so she could watch them live instead of on a viewscreen.

“Luke’s having fun.” She comments, gun lifting in an arc as her scope follows said warlock’s body as it flew through the air from another launcher blast. It had taken her a while to get used to the idea that death wasn’t typically permanent for guardians, but she’d evidently reached the point of morbid disinterest most of them reach at one point or another.

Gil grunts at the observation and ignores her attempt to deflect. She’d called his attention for a reason, and he had never understood the irrational human fear of avoiding being up front. “You wanted to ask something.”

Plus, he wants to get back to the skirmish.

Her gaze goes long and the rifle in her hands lowers. She sets it aside, pushes away from the cliff edge, and lifts her legs up underneath her so she’s sitting cross-legged.

Gil’s demeanor grows even grumpier. Unless something was at stake she had a terrible poker face—he wonders why she keeps challenging Cayde to cards. After too long of a silence he steps towards the cliff edge.

“Can exos fall in love?” She asks before he can make the jump back down to the arena.

The question halts him, and he replays it within his head again, and _again_ , to make sure he had heard her right. Then, he takes an extra three seconds to process it, and then digs deeper into his synthetic functions and runs it through algorithms and logic centers and extremely limited philosophical ideologies—and even runs it by his ghost, privately—and Gil ultimately concludes that he doesn’t understand it.

An old, _old_ philosophy said that exos were machines, and machines by their nature were incapable of a concept as ambiguous and subjective as love. Another said that all sentient creatures, and exos _were_ sentient, were capable of it.

Most religions screamed ruin and damnation on anything without their god’s graces and a soul even contemplating such an idea.

The follow up question—do synthetic beings like him have souls?—makes him almost as uncomfortable as the first.

In his mind an image of a dark-skinned, tall human woman with long, dark hair, radiant in her armored white and gold robes, appears, and Gil frowns. Troubled. Confused. He pushes the image away and determines that he’ll try to figure out why it had appeared in the first place later.

He understands the basic concept of love, but he has no frame of reference to file it under. He has the big picture, but he misses the finer details. He’d never been the type for art, so he’d probably just destroy the big picture anyway. He didn’t see the point in the any of it, but he knows his team better than they might expect from someone so pointedly stoic, and he has some idea of why she’s asking. Especially after he connects his earlier thought of card games to her current line of questioning.

He apparently took too long to answer. She starts to babble. “I mean, I just, you guys aren’t _human_ , but you act so damn similar sometimes it’s easy to forget—that’s egocentric, isn’t it? Humans assuming that everything sentient acts like them? You guys can feel fear, right? And other emotions, so I thought maybe—”

“Is this about the hunter vanguard?” He asks bluntly, and in spite of the helmet covering her features he can practically sense her flushing underneath it. It answers his question as effectively as any words might have.

Luke’s ghost pops into existence between them, flashing as the warlock revives up onto the cliff. “Is what about the hunter vanguard? Ooh, wait— _wait_ , did she finally ask him?!”

Without missing a beat, Quinn lifts a leg and then boots Luke off the cliff.

As one, Gil and Quinn lean over the edge and watch as Kel runs by, bullets on his heels and nipping at his cloak, to revive Luke from the hard fall.

A moment later, Quinn winces when Shaxx barks into her ear that friendly fire is most certainly not a part of this exercise and she’s _not even supposed to be participating_. Gil’s probably going to have to make the excuse later that by all technicalities, she still isn’t.

He glances at the match timer in the bottom right hand of his helmet’s HUD; four minutes, thirty-five seconds remaining. Their fireteam was winning.

The two of them are silent.

“It’s a stupid question. Forget it.” Quinn mumbles, her demeanor blatantly morose. It’s so out of place on the bright young woman that Gil feels discomfort prickle at his circuits.

“It isn’t impossible.” He finally answers her, his own voice a mumbled grouse, and her gaze snaps up to him. “Our emotions are just subroutines, Quinn. Not real. Seem real, maybe. Actors putting on masks, at best. Lines of code at worst.”

He grows even more uncomfortable. He’s never had to put into words how his own… _personality_ works. It’s a sort of philosophical self-awareness he doesn’t like digging into. He’s a machine who happens to have a brain that mimics a human’s—he’s a machine of war, regardless, not a philosopher. These questions aren’t his to contemplate and answer. But with a brain that so closely mimics a humans’ as to copy and parrot emotions like fear and excitement and boredom, to have emotions _at all_ , does that make him a machine with complex coding, or complex coding that happens to be a real person that happens to be made of synthetic materials?

 _Can_ exos fall in love?

He can feel the philosophical issue start to form a positive feedback loop in his deeper processes, and he shuts it down before it required a reboot to get his own mind under control.

“I don’t have anything to compare it to. Just steel and coding. Haven’t—” His thoughts again supply the image of the the woman from before, the one he swears he recognizes but can’t remember why, and his facial plates become pinched once more, “—haven’t experienced it. Possible. Probably. I care for my team, Cayde-6 cares for his. I can’t speak for him. You have to ask him.”

He steps forward and hops off the cliff to rejoin the match before she can continue the uncomfortable discussion.

Exos were as wildly varied as humans. If it were possible for them to fall in love, Gil wasn’t going to and didn’t want to be the first to try and understand how or why.


End file.
